The National Transportation Safety Board provided a preliminary report last week on the fatal June 29 airplane crash just west of the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport.

But it did not discuss an issue raised by California pilot Juan Browne on his YouTube channel and discussed in depth by Boardman pilot Chuck Johnson — evidence that the aircraft was moving left prematurely as it started to fly — an indication that it may have been experiencing left-engine trouble.

The twin-engine Cessna 441 was on its way to Montana, but crashed into a wooded neighborhood in Howland, killing the pilot and all five passengers, all from the Mahoning Valley.

Browne, who has posted numerous videos on aviation-related issues and other content, quoted from the preliminary FAA Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast radar tracking information for the flight.

It indicated the aircraft “only” obtained a ground speed of 110 knots “well down the runway, and (the aircraft was) already off course and gaining very little altitude at all” before crashing a short distance away, Browne said on his video.

The plane was “just riding over the treetops over the (roadway) to the point of impact,” he said. It crashed along Spring Run Road, about 1.2 miles west of the liftoff location on the runway.

Browne plotted a handful of “data points” he obtained from the ADSB tracking onto a Google Earth map, showing that the aircraft was moving or pulling to its left as it started to fly, which The Ohio State University aviation professor Shawn Pruchnicki said is not normal.

Browne said he believed one of the “first things” investigators will be looking for is whether there was some sort of “controllability issue,” such as whether a “control lock” was left on in the aircraft that prevented the crew from properly controlling the aircraft.

He noted that two “fairly experienced pilots” were in the aircraft, the pilot, Joe Maxin of Canfield, and Timothy Blake of Hubbard, in the co-pilot seat.

The other passengers were James and Ronnie Weller, and John and Maria Weller, all of Hubbard.

Browne noted the aircraft “may very well have been” close to the “maximum gross weight of 8,850 pounds because of it having six people on board and full fuel.”

Browne said the airplane had a lot of runway ahead of it at the point where it lifted off, so “the aircraft could have easily stopped in the remaining amount of runway” if Maxin had chosen to “reject the takeoff” instead of lifting off.

Browne said investigators will want to look at the controls in the aircraft and the possibility that an engine failed because the “pull to the left with very little climb seems to indicate a problem with the left engine potentially.”

FEATHERING

But he also discussed an issue called “feathering” that describes the angle of an airplane’s propellers. Brown said it is “very important to get the propeller of a failed engine into the feathered condition … to minimize the drag of the windmilling propeller.”

Two photographs on the Uretsky Aviation Facebook page show the difference between propellers that are in a feathered position and not in a feathered position. When a propeller is in the “flat” position, it is not feathered. When a propeller is turned into the wind and therefore not “flat,” it is in a feathered position, the photos show.

Propellers on some aircraft automatically move into a feathered position when needed. But in other aircraft, a pilot needs to manually change the propeller into a feathered position with controls in the aircraft in the event of engine failure, Browne and Johnson said.

CHUCK JOHNSON

Johnson was an American Airlines pilot for 21 years who also helped the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport obtain commercial airline service nearly 20 years ago. Johnson said in an interview last week that he wonders whether something went wrong with the left engine that prevented Maxin from being able to “feather the engine or something like that.”

Johnson said the aircraft lifted off at the 4,400- to 4,500-foot point down the 9,000-foot runway, but it “should have been airborne at 2,100 2,200 feet” based on the requirements of the aircraft and weather conditions. Johnson said it may not be coincidental that the aircraft lifted off at the distance down the runway that is called the “accelerated go distance.”

Johnson described the accelerated go distance as the place on the runway where a pilot would need to get airborne or abort the takeoff if it was having engine trouble, for instance.

Johnson said the fact that the plane did not leave the runway at the normal 2,100 or 2,200 feet down the runway suggests to him that something went wrong with the aircraft. The preliminary NTSB report stated that “Witnesses who were located about 1.5 (miles) northwest from the accident site reported hearing the sound of an airplane initiating its takeoff roll. They then heard a noticeable pitch change in the engine sound.”

Johnson said he thinks that information is relevant.

“You don’t have to know the first thing about aviation, but if you live near an airport long enough, you know how the engines sound. That airplane was a staple over there. It was around for years. I’m just wondering if it pulled to the left and didn’t climb,” Johnson said. “The fact that it didn’t climb and the fact that it was pulling to the left, you could say that maybe something happened to the left engine.”

He believes the positioning of the controls on the airplane may help NTSB investigators determine some things about what caused the crash. And investigators also will probably be able to tell whether the propellers were feathered or not.

He said one thing he does not like about that airplane: “it does not have an automatic feathering system.” A pilot has to “feather it yourself.”

Johnson described the aircraft at takeoff “going to the left, to the left, to the left,” adding that it was “in the air less than a mile and a half before it crashed. And it wasn’t climbing.” He said he thinks the airplane would have been able to climb normally even with only one good engine unless the propeller on the failed engine was not feathered.

He said if the left engine was not working properly, the pilot would not have turned left intentionally because pilots know you never “turn into a dead engine,” Johnson said.

The flight to Montana was going to take the aircraft left upon leaving the runway, but pilots know that they are “supposed to stay over the runway until you get to the end of it. And the aircraft was off to the left before (it) even got to the end of it,” Johnson said.

Typically, a pilot will contact the tower after getting in the air. That is when the tower will tell the pilot to “continue on course” toward its destination, Johnson said. That is when the aircraft would have started its left turn toward Montana, Johnson said.

The ADSB data showed that the radar at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport detected the aircraft at seven points after it lifted off from the runway, with the first one being at 7,100 feet down the runway. At that point, the plane had already “drifted off the runway, maybe 35 to 50 feet,” Johnson said, adding that the aircraft “continued to pull to the left.” Johnson was basing that on the ADSB data Browne depicted in his video.

Johnson trains pilots, and one of the things they teach pilots is the “startle effect,” which is what a pilot may experience if something suddenly goes wrong in an aircraft, he said. “You can train all you want, but when something goes wrong,” a pilot is going to be startled, he said. He doesn’t know if Maxin experienced the “startle effect” or not, but it’s possible.

Johnson said local media coverage has described Maxin as being the pilot and Blake as co-pilot. But the Cessna 441 is a “single-pilot airplane,” Johnson said. There is a second seat next to the pilot, and some people like the idea of having a “safety pilot,” Johnson said. But having a co-pilot requires the pilot and co-pilot to have a conversation before the flight about the expectations of the two, Johnson said.

Johnson said if he has a co-pilot, the communications between him and the co-pilot need to be efficient. “If someone wants to bring something to my attention, fine but then shut the (deleted) up,” Johnson said.

OHIO STATE PROFESSOR

Pruchnicki, a former commercial airline pilot and now assistant professor at the Centre for Aviation Studies at The Ohio State University, who has worked as an accident investigator, said he was trained at the same place where current NTSB investigators were trained, the National Transportation Safety Board training academy.

He said with an accident like the one in Howland, two things stand out, though “everything is on the table.” He said they are “engine problems and overweight conditions.”

He said when “airplanes fail to climb, those are the two things you think about. There is a third one that sometimes we see with accidents where airplanes just level off is when pilots become distracted in the cockpit because of some other type of emergency, something else happens in the airplane that becomes a significant distraction.”

He said a pilot can “inadvertently, mistakenly level the airplane off, become very focused on whatever that issue is and level the airplane off … and eventually fly into trees or something. That is not nearly as common.”

Pruchnicki said he is aware that the runway the airplane was using is 9,000 feet long, and this Cessna 441 took a long time to get in the air.

“Typically these planes only use up to around 3,000 feet of runway. There are some variables there, but not enough variables for it to go all the way out to 4,500 feet,” before lifting off, he said.

If Maxin started out at the beginning of the runway, the plane traveled 4,500 feet before lifting off, Pruchnicki said. “That’s strange. That should not be. The only time you see that with everything being normal is high density operations, when it’s really, really hot and you are at a really high altitude, like when you are in Denver or out in the mountains someplace and the temperature is warm,” he said, which is not an issue in Ohio.

“Is that an overweight problem, and is that why it took so much runway? Or was that a power plant problem — an engine that was not producing the amount of power that it should have been producing?”

He said from what he has learned, he thinks the aircraft had a left-engine partial failure “as opposed to a flat-out engine failure” and a possible “decrease in engine power.” He said that would cause an airplane to “yaw to the left whenever you have a decrease in power in any type of twin-engine airplane.”

He said when that happens, the pilot must compensate for that with the rudder pedals.

He said partial loss of the left engine “kind of fits. You can’t say that’s what it is right now, but I would love to be part of that engine tear-down to see what that engine really looked like,” he said.

A left engine only producing 70 to 80% power would explain the aircraft taking longer than normal to lift off, he said.

He finds it “pretty hard to believe” that a pilot would still take off with a lot of runway still in front of him while having engine failure, “so that kind of doesn’t fit. You almost have to wonder if (the engine) failed right at (takeoff) or just as he became airborne and (there was) a significant reduction of power in the left engine.”

Pruchnicki said, “As multi-engine pilots, we are trained to handle these (situations). It starts to pull to the left, you step on the right rudder pedal. There are those few minutes of ‘Holy shit, is that really happening,'” he said.

Pruchnicki said the ADSB data suggests that there was “something very abnormal about this takeoff, and this airplane is pulling to the left.” He said he is certain the NTSB is looking at the ADSB data and will be able to see exactly where the airplane was at any given moment in time. “But it’s going to come down to weight (of the plane) or left engine problem,” Pruchnicki said of the cause of the crash. “Those are the top two.”